Eur. Phys. J. B (2017) 90: 10
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2016-70618-0

Regular Article

Target recovery in complex networks

¹ Department of physics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, P.R. China
² School of Systems Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, P.R. China

^a e-mail: anzeng@bnu.edu.cn

Received: 17 October 2016
Received in final form: 30 November 2016
Published online: 18 January 2017

Abstract

The invulnerability of complex networks is an important issue which has been widely analyzed in different fields. A lot of works have been done to measure and improve the stability of complex networks when being attacked. Recently, how to recover networks after attack was intensively studied. The existing methods are mainly designed to recover the overall functionality of networks, yet in many real cases the recovery of important nodes should be given priority, to which we refer target recovery. For example, when the cold wave paralyses the railway networks, target recovery means to repair those stations or railways such that the transport capacity of densely-populated cities can be recovered as fast as possible. In this paper, we first compare the impact of attacks on the whole network and target nodes respectively, and then study the efficiency of traditional recovery methods that are proposed based on global centrality metrics. Furthermore, based on target centrality metrics, we introduce a local betweenness recovery method and we find it has better performance than the traditional methods. We finally propose a hybrid recovery method which includes local betweenness metric and local closeness metric. The performance of the hybrid method is shown to be similar to that of the greedy algorithm.